All posts tagged: shapes

Texas data center backlash shapes 2026 election races

Texas data center backlash shapes 2026 election races

Published by Sam Flores

TEXAS — Mason McCallister said it was an act of God that sent him down a gravel road near his home in Bells, Texas, one Sunday last December. It wasn’t the normal route he and his family take back from church, but he decided to detour so his daughters could shout hello to their grandmother as they drove by her home. What he saw that day catapulted him into a debate playing out around the country — and especially in Texas — over data centers. It’s one that may now affect the outcome of key elections in the Lone Star State. As they rolled past, flashes of red caught McCallister’s eye among the lush green of the area’s gentle hills. “Driving down that road, I just see survey markers everywhere,” McCallister, a real estate agent, told CNBC. “And I knew at that time what was happening. I could feel it” — a data center is coming, he said. Mason McCallister, a real estate agent who has argued for stricter regulations and more transparency around data …

‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons. That legacy still shapes defence planning

‘Peaceful’ Sweden once sought nuclear weapons. That legacy still shapes defence planning

Published by Sam Flores

For decades, Sweden has fostered a self-image as something of a world record-holder for peace, celebrating more than two centuries since it was last at war. But this record involves some creative accounting. The narrative, for example, excludes Sweden’s participation in modern-day military operations in Afghanistan and Libya. Nor has Swedish “peacefulness” been entirely pacifist. The country operated one of the world’s largest air forces during the cold war, for example. But less well known is how far Sweden progressed towards developing nuclear weapons of its own. Despite never producing a bomb, the history of its unrealised nuclear weapons programme offers important insights for understanding security policy today. Back in 1945, just months after the US had dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Swedish military researchers began investigating this new weapon. In 1948, the defence staff asked the Swedish National Defence Research Institute (FOA) to examine the possibility of producing atomic bombs in Sweden. We think we know Sweden – a peaceful nation grounded in social democracy, natural beauty, IKEA …

What shapes your personality? Your genes and environment play a big role.

What shapes your personality? Your genes and environment play a big role.

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. I consider myself to have a somewhat challenging personality. The popular Myers-Briggs test labels me an ‘INTJ,’ commonly referred to as an “Architect.” We’re supposedly independent, determined, curious, and original, but we’re also considered combative, overly critical, dismissive of emotions, and more concerned with “rationality and success over politeness.”  My family would generally agree with that description of me. Perhaps thankfully, we are a rare bunch: only two to four percent of people, and about one percent of women, are INTJs. I’m expecting my first child, a daughter, in January. The prospect of meeting a mini “Architect” has me wondering: Are we born with our personalities? The answer is complicated—and still evolving.  “All of it comes from genes, and all of it comes …

What Shapes Your Current Life Experience?

What Shapes Your Current Life Experience?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Each of us goes through the day with a unique sense of self. Some people feel like winners who look forward to endless positive experiences. Some people feel like persecuted victims who the world just can’t stop messing with. And some of us have a pervasive sense of anger, loneliness, heartache. Or even idolizing love for another person. These senses-of-self serve as frames of reference for how we perceive the world and experience it emotionally. Your emotional experience is real, but is it really that stable or central to who you are? Here is an example: Although I could have woken my wife to give me a ride, I chose to walk home from work the other night. It was beautiful, cool, and crisp with the moon showing through puffy white clouds. I felt happy and healthy. On the way home, I passed a house where a year ago an irate homeowner had berated me for dropping a banana peel in his curbside trash can. As I continued my walk, I realized that I had …

2-kiloparsec trail of stars could reveal how dark matter shapes galaxies

2-kiloparsec trail of stars could reveal how dark matter shapes galaxies

Published by Jenni Sidey

A thin ribbon of stars around the ultra-diffuse galaxy UGC 9050-Dw1 may be the first globular-cluster stellar stream identified beyond the Milky Way. Its shape allowed astronomers to reconstruct the galaxy’s gravity and estimate how much dark matter surrounds it. Deeper observations are still needed to confirm the stream’s origin, but future space telescopes could uncover many more examples. A faint arc only about 72 parsecs wide is peeling away from a star cluster 115 million light-years from Earth. If the interpretation holds, it gives astronomers a new way to map dark matter far beyond the Milky Way. The feature lies in UGC 9050-Dw1, an ultra-diffuse galaxy with a sparse population of stars. Astronomers named the arc Oyashio, after a cold Pacific Ocean current. It stretches about 2 kiloparsecs from a globular cluster candidate roughly 2.5 kiloparsecs from the galaxy’s center. Globular clusters are dense collections of stars held together by gravity. As one circles a galaxy, tidal forces can pull stars from its edges. The escaped stars keep moving along similar orbits, creating thin …

Pterosaurs had far more diverse wing shapes than scientists previously knew

Pterosaurs had far more diverse wing shapes than scientists previously knew

Published by Jenni Sidey

Pterosaurs ruled the air long before birds did, and over more than 100 million years they grew into everything from small fliers to giants with wingspans above 10 meters. That range should have produced a striking variety of wing designs. Instead, modern scientific reconstructions often make them look oddly alike. That mismatch sits at the center of a new study led by the University of Bristol, published in Paleobiology. The analysis argues that commonly published pterosaur wing reconstructions capture far less diversity than would be expected for animals that varied so much in size, ecology, and flight style. No pterosaur fossil preserves a perfectly clear, undistorted full wing shape, which helps explain the problem. Some fossils preserve parts of the flight membrane, but none show the whole wing spread out in a way that settles the debate. As a result, scientists have had to build reconstructions from bones, limited soft-tissue evidence, and educated judgment about where membranes attached to the body and legs. That has left major room for disagreement. Pterosaurs were the first group …

The Nose-Brain Axis: How Smell Shapes Mood and Memory

The Nose-Brain Axis: How Smell Shapes Mood and Memory

Published by Jenni Sidey

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”—Helen Keller A sense of smell is underrated. While we exalt our vision and hearing, smell seems like an optional add-on. But when we sit down to a meal, although we appreciate the sizzle of a fajita or the sight of a beautiful fruit plate, it is the heavenly smell of good food that lifts our mood. Smell brings out the hedonist in us all. So it’s shocking that almost 20 percent of the population has a poor or non-existent sense of smell. This has an outsized impact on our mood, enjoyment of food, hygiene, social interactions, and even our sex life. Worse yet, it can affect our lifespan. A Swedish study found that olfactory dysfunction—not heart failure, stroke, liver damage, or cancer—is the best predictor of five-year mortality in older adults. Smell is a deeply primeval sense. Even microbes, which don’t have noses, eyes, or ears, have a way to sniff their environment so they can …

Animals have personalities. Here’s what shapes them.

Animals have personalities. Here’s what shapes them.

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. We tend to think of wild animals as being spared from the messy business of personality: the family dramas, the psychological wounds, the baffling quirks that keep resurfacing like whack-a-moles. Turns out, nobody gets out of that. Animals have personalities, too, and many of the same complex forces that shape our personalities shape theirs. “They’re not spared,” says Dr. Alison M. Bell, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Illinois Urbana, tells Popular Science. “Life is hard for them, too.” But life is also “rich,” says Bell, full of ups and downs, wounds and triumphs, just like human lives. It’s one of those truths that is both surprising and incredibly obvious, especially for those of us with pets. And yet the study of …

How Death Shapes What We Buy

How Death Shapes What We Buy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Money is never just money. It represents security, freedom, status, control, care, identity, and sometimes a very organized attempt to keep existential dread in a high-yield savings account. A growing body of research suggests that awareness of death—what psychologists call mortality salience—can influence how we spend, save, insure, invest, and plan for what happens after we are gone. This does not mean every estate plan is a disguised panic attack, or every luxury purchase is a cry for immortality in Italian leather. But it does mean that our financial behaviors are often shaped by deeper emotional motives than spreadsheets alone can explain. Terror management theory offers one helpful lens. The theory proposes that as humans, we face a uniquely difficult psychological conflict: we want to live, yet we know we will die. To manage that anxiety, we seek meaning, self-esteem, cultural belonging, and forms of symbolic continuation—ways to feel that something of us will matter beyond our biological lives. Classic terror management research suggests that reminders of death can increase our need to defend valued …

How the Experience of Wonder Shapes Children

How the Experience of Wonder Shapes Children

Published by Jenni Sidey

Wonder is often described as an emotion or a behavior, but it is more accurately understood as a state that integrates both. Fueled by curiosity, surprise, confusion, delight, anticipation, and connection, wonder invites children to see the familiar with fresh eyes, engage the unknown, and transform experience into meaning. In turn, wonder fuels the imagination—not simply the capacity for pretend play, but the ability to hold symbolic ideas in mind, consider multiple possibilities, and develop skills such as cognitive flexibility, perspective-taking, and problem-solving1. Children wonder about experiences that feel significant to them. Emotions signal that significance, organizing attention, memory, interpretation, and action as children work to understand how an experience fits into their developing sense of themselves, their relationships, and the world around them. All learning occurs through a dynamic process of meaning-making, supported by an authentic state of wonder, not repetition alone. As children explore their worlds and take note of patterns and themes, choosing what information gets digested and what gets ignored, they are relying on the cues of important adults, the emotional …